September 8, 2012

Something about Star Trek. Clicking makes lots of stuff happen, but doesn't answer what the occasion for the elaborate doodle is. I'm going to guess the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gene Roddenberry.

That was yesterday's Google Doodle, too. If you click on the door and wait for the next frame then click on the little guy in red on the transporter platform, he cries. That made me laugh. The guy in red always dies.

It's a pretty elaborate doodle. If you click on the transporter it takes you to another frame with Kirk and the guy in red. Click on the tree and then on the rock. The guy in red suffers collateral damage with each action. And don't you just love the elaborate hair on the Kirk character? Makes one think of later Shatner wigs.

The scene is from an actual Star Trek episode. The one where Kirk has to battle a lizard-like alien with only the materials at hand. He makes a cannon out of a cylinderical object and stones then makes his own gun powder. He wins.

I see it's just the 46th anniversary of the debut of the show. Nothing especially momentous.

HA! I almost spilt my coffee on that one:

My dear lady - just for starters - that would be the birthdate of James Tiberius Kirk, Captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise, lover of aliens regardless of color, the only somewhat-logical human capable of being Spock's best friend, and one of television entertainment's few embodiments of the phrase "a man amongst men."

Not true about the alien killing. In "Arena", Kirk had the chance to kill the Gorn and instead showed mercy. Same in "The Devil In The Dark". I could list a few other episodes but then my hopeless geekdom would be completely obvious. ;)

If you'd let the cursor hover on the pic for a minute, you'd have had your answer. Click the first o and you get Uhura with sparkles. Click the control panel and you get Star Trekky sound efects. Click turbo-lift doors to get to the transporter room. Click red shirt and he cries,click panel in upper left corner, you get tribbles. Click transporter panel and get to planet. Use the tree, the stone and the thing laying on top of the hill to kill alien. Each weapon causes damage to the red shirt. The scene then returns to the Bridge. Why didn't the red shirt die???

joethefatman wrote:Click the control panel and you get Star Trekky sound efects.

More precisely they're Paramount sound effects. The "photon torpedo" sound was created for George Pal's "War of the Worlds" (in reality a long thin piece of spring steel being tapped with a hammer) and was therefore available for use in other Paramount productions. They even used it in the Bob Hope comedy "Son of Paleface".

Whether you like Star Trek or not, you would have to have a certain sort of cultural blindness not to recognize that it has been a cultural phenomenon for 46 years. It's hard to think of any other entertainment franchise that has a reach like that. The closest analogue might be 60s musicians like Bob Dylan who are still producing music and drawing crowds 45 years later; but a musician or group can only persist as one identity. Star Trek has proliferated into multiple identities and variations.

Back in the late 60s, Gulf+Western (which later became CBS TV and later still part of the Paramount empire) made a deal to buy out Desilu Studios for a modest price. Included among the assets were two obscure genre shows, Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. In movie tickets ALONE, those two franchises have since generated 3.5 BILLION dollars in revenue. That doesn't count DVD sales, spinoff series, rerun royalties, tie-in novels, toys, video games...

It makes me wonder about the executives who approved that purchase: were they still around when those payoffs started to come in? Or did they retire earlier, with not much to show for their efforts but gold watches?